On “ABC World News” tonight, Steve Osunsami did a fine report on an Atlanta man who has been using 440,000 gallons of water a month–about 50 times the average usage. The Atlanta Constitution unearthed the story, now the whole city…
For the second time in a week, the Washington Post has teed up the Jews-and-power issue in a defensive manner. Yesterday it was a long piece by Ruth Wisse saying that Jews are a historically powerless people who had to…
After their ’60 Minutes’ appearance, I’m on Valerie Plame and Robert Wilson’s side. During the Iraq war horror, they were patriots, and they paid a price. Wilson stuck his neck out on a big lie. Period. I still don’t buy…
Some time in the next few days the website israellobbybook.com will be activated–right now it’s a blank–and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, will be published by FSG. This is a…
Joachim has pointed me to a number of our coreligionists’ angry responses to the splendid Noah Feldman piece on marrying a gentile in the July 22 New York Times Magazine. Boy, religious Jews are pissed. One blogger calls Feldman a…
On Meet the Press yesterday, Tim Russert sharply questioned George Tenet over his passivity during the runup to the Iraq War. Disaster was looming, the executive was justifying war with lies; and yet the intelligence chief did not tell the…
I heard a report that Sen. Barack Obama’s position on Israel/Palestine is no different from the Democratic mainstream, that in fact he abandoned a more progressive view—which you might expect given his multicultural/international backstory—to get there. I asked someone who…
A few months back, the brilliant and flawed David Brooks said that blue/red was giving way to a new divide in American society that would play out in ideology and partisan politics: globalist interventionist elites on one side, populist isolationist…
Tonight’s the big debate. I haven’t been so excited since Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag squared off over feminism. As a pipsqueak, I was on the wrong side then (Mailer’s), now I’m on the right one. One…